In working towards ways of reading Mann, so that his own advances in suggesting new perspectives will become more vivid, I do some fairly standard philosophical analysis of ideas in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

Mann and Joyce are very different, and yet their fiction often appeals to the same people: Harry Levin taught a famous course on Joyce, Proust, and Mann, and Joseph Campbell singled out Joyce and Mann as special favorites. To see them as offering "possibilities for living", as I do, isn't to identify any distinctive commonality. After all, many great authors would fall under that rubric.

Wilhelmine Germany was hostile to the expression of same-sex love - and, of course, Mann would have known of the fate of Oscar Wilde. His early reading of Platen's poetry, and, probably when he was in his early twenties, of Platen's diaries, introduced him to a form of sexual expression he found profoundly congenial. It's not quite Platonic.

It may be hyperbolic to declare that Shakespeare teaches us more about being human than all the natural scientists combined.

Because the problems are objective features of the human situation - social animals without the capacities for making social life come easily - ethics is objectively constrained. It's not the case that "anything goes".

Mann's sexuality and his attitudes towards it are extremely complex - and the complexities are inherited in the figure of Aschenbach. Mann had lived through a series of (almost certainly unconsummated) relationships with young men.

The moment in which the narrator, reaching for his boots, becomes vividly and lastingly aware of the finality of his grandmother's death is another such moment. It would be interesting to explore Proust's great novel from the perspective of seeing how stable synthetic complexes are formed and modified.